Topic - TechCrunch

After scores of accounts were potentially compromised a few months ago, Twitter today launched two-factor authentication through SMS to protect people from hacks and phishing scams on the web. Unfortunately, it may not help shared accounts like big brands and news agencies where multiple people need to be able to log in and out but only one phone number can get the login verification codes.

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifi...

Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow's superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup.

There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It's not a brand new platform. It's what Google has used for years. It is Google's foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it's open for the first time to developers and businesses. Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.

While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant u...

Retooling the traditional public library for a more technically savvy populace is no small feat, especially when library budgets across the U.S. have been gutted these past few years. That sad state of events has forced some libraries to take matters into their own hands. Consider the case of the Northlake Public Library in Northlake, Illinois -- it wants to give its communinity (and especially the town's children) access to a slew of new digital creation tools to help inspire the next genera...

With Xbox 360 having started well but ended in a very confused state, I worry that Microsoft is about to carry over much of its baggage to the new console. Will the company make the same mistake of not listening to the market that it has often made in recent years? Will it continue to believe that there is a burgeoning market for an everything box? Or will it refocus on what matters?

Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it's pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.

I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start - six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened rooms. The Shogun aimed a finger at a door and the princess was forced into bondage. You were the K...

The weekend isn't upon us just yet, but here's a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in -- the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a bit of luminescent DIY flair.

Calling all hardware hackers: the Raspberry Pi camera module has gone on sale online via Pi suppliers including RS Components and Premier Farnell/Element14, providing the eye required for all those computer vision projects you had in mind for Pi. The module actually went on sale yesterday and is currently temporarily out of stock on RS' website. The module costs between £17 & £19 or around $25.

As one is wont to do, I was checking the French iOS app store rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app "ameli, l'Assurance Maladie" was still in spot No. 3 when sacrebleu! -- Path was the No. 1 free app in France. Now I've never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it's super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach scrolling through all the things you people are doing on weekends without me. Though I found the redesign t...

Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android of all places. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple's locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices - a process that's similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Cydia for Android could soon become home to some of those same tweaks in time - or at least allow developers to...

“Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about location, location, location.” — Frank Underwood, House of Cards At this very moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s political lobby, FWD.us, is probably taken aback at how reviled it has become, both from the public and its own members. After all, there are countless political technology lobbies, including Facebook’s own Political Action Committee, which routinely offer Republican candidates campaign cash for quid pro quo political favor. So, why, after di...

Nokia has officially pulled back the curtain on the Lumia 928 Windows Phone 8 device, which advertises its PureView camera as its marquee feature. The new flagship phone offers an 8.7-megapixel front-facing camera, which boasts optical image stabilization for better low-light photography and more stable pics overall.

Jack Conte is an Internet musician who became an Internet sensation and now, thanks to Patreon, he's an Internet entrepreneur.

In November 2011, Identified emerged out of public beta on a mission to create a better professional job search engine. Built on top of Facebook data, Identified set out to nibble at LinkedIn's lead in this space by giving both job seekers and companies a better way to connect -- and find talent. To do that, the startup offered a product that it promised would become something akin to the "Google Page Rank for people," assigning a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals and companies bas...

A startup called Webflakes aims to bring some of the best international content on fashion, food, travel, and more to English-speaking readers with the help of volunteer translators. The site is officially launching today, and the company is also announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding. CEO Nathan Shuchami told me that people searching the web can sometimes struggle to find "genuine, authentic content" on a given topic due to language issues. For example, if your'e a wine...

The Syrian government claims it's working to repair yesterday's widespread Internet blackout. State-run media are reporting that a "fault in optical fibre cables" disconnected the beleaguered Middle-Eastern nation from the rest of the digital world. But, multiple experts are calling the oppressive regime on its BS. Michelle Zatlyn of security firm, Cloudflare, which identified Syria's blackout yesterday, tells Techcrunch in an email that the incident is "almost certainly intentional. It is un...

Today, Google announced the eventual rollout of a brand new look for its Admin Console, an area that only admins of Google Apps will see. The aim of the redesign is to help admins get to information quicker, manage user accounts easier and keep their companies running as smoothly as possible. The company boasts that "millions" of businesses, schools and government agencies are using Google Apps, so making sure that the Admin Console is as easy to use as possible is key to getting buy-in.

Microsoft's Office Web Apps have been around since 2010. Since then, they have slowly morphed from lightweight document viewers to relatively full-blown Office apps. Going forward, Microsoft senior product marketing manager Amanda Lefebvre wrote in a blog post last night, the plan is "to deliver Office Web Apps that people can rely on to create polished Office documents from start to finish, all from the Web." To do this, Microsoft is going to focus on three key areas: user experience, social...

Makerbot has released an inspiring video about how a group of hackers built 3D-printed hands for children and adults who are missing fingers or entire hands. The project aims to take the cost and complexity associated with hand prosthesis out of the process. It is working.

Mass Appeal, a joint venture that's both reviving the Broolyn-based, graffiti-focused magazine of the same name and also moving into online content, is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in funding. It's backed by a mix of traditional firms and figures from the hip hop world. The rapper, (and one-time TechCrunch contributor) Nas announced last month that he had invested a "six-figure sum" in the company, and he's also serving as Mass Appeal's associate publisher. Publisher Peter Bitte...

BitTorrent is taking a new step today in its efforts to help creators make money (and make money itself) — it's releasing a new content packaging format called the BitTorrent Bundle in alpha mode. The company has already been working with different creators to launch promotional bundles. For example, author Tim Ferriss packaged chapters of his book with other supplementary media material as a way to promote sales of his newest work, while musicians like DJ Shadow have used BitTorrent to promo...

One of the most impressive things we happened upon at CES this year was the Tactus keyboard, a special fluid-filled layer that could be baked into a tablet or smartphone to provide users with a physical keyboard that could recede back into the screen when it wasn’t needed. Since then the company has been flying under the radar, but it turns out Tactus has been hard at work on a prototype device with help from a prominent player in the touch interaction space. Tactus confirmed to TechCrunch th...

There were plenty of promising startups showing off at Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley (one of them even became a Battlefield finalist as an audience choice), but none managed to yank on the ol’ heartstrings quite as much Tapgram. Long story short, Tapgram aims to dramatically simplify the process of communicating for people who have trouble doing it otherwise.

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him @nireyal. How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story. Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what...

Sometimes the simplest product demos can be effective. Take a new web editor called Barley. To show off the product, co-founder Colin Devroe opened me a regular old web page, then changed the wording of the page with just a few keystrokes. A small editing menu opened as he typed, but didn't have to access an admin dashboard, open a separate editor, edit any HTML, or anything like that. To be clear, there was more to the demo — but that was the heart of it. The point is to offer a web page edi...

Beep boop boop bee squeee! Happy May 4th a k a Star Wars Day (say the date out loud and you'll figure out why). In celebration, quite a few hardware vendors have released special gear for the day, thereby allowing you to celebrate the magic of George Lucas in proper Mandalorian fashion.

A little less than a year ago, a little company called LinkSmart launched to help publishers use text links to get their readers reading more. Now it has raised $5 million in Series B funding to take its technology for growing audiences and make it more widely available. The financing was led by Foundry Group and Costanoa Venture Partners.

In the near future, the only difference between a smartphone, tablet, and a laptop will be the size of the screen. Hardcore gamers could play 3D intensive games in a smartphone, and Michael Bay could render “Transformers 4″ from his iPad. Otoy, an LA-based software company, has discovered a way to stream any application to any device, completely through a web browser. It’s difficult to overestimate the potential disruptiveness of Otoy, as a breakthrough streaming service could, in the near fu...

Google Glass is finding its way to developers and others and the reaction has been, well, predictable. So far, there are those who think that Glass will absolutely change the world, that it’s our version of the flying car. Those people are full of shit. On the other side of the coin, there are those who say that Glass will never find a place in the hearts of consumers, that it’s unnecessary and that Google is just trying to be cool. Those people are also full of shit. The problem is that when...

If Google is worried about Google Glass being too "nerdy", they probably wouldn't be sending people rockin' the Glass into the heart of the most gloriously nerdy thing in the world, the Large Hadron Collider. Fortunately, Google doesn't seem to care (nor should they) if their amazing little experiment gets a few knocks along the way. As a result, we get videos like this one.

There are already plenty of journaling apps out there, but Step stands out as a personal data aggregator that records and helps you make sense of your life's minutiae.

Songza, the app that matches expert-created music playlists to your mood or activity, has just released a huge update to its iOS app, streamlining the experience quite a bit and cleaning up the UI to ensure that users are getting the best music to match their mood and activity in the fastest time possible. To start, you’ll notice straight off the bat that the Concierge screen has changed dramatically, with new colors in the background and the removal of the navigation bar at the bottom of the...

A new game today available for iOS devices called Heads Up! provides an entertaining experience you could only have with a smartphone, with a simple game mechanic and a video sharing feature that means the fun can last well beyond the initial play period. The game also features a big brand tie-in, as it was made by Clear app developer Impending for Ellen DeGeneres, and featured on her show. It's a content marketing play, but one that's extremely well-executed and features a light touch on the...

Microsoft has released WebMatrix 3, the latest version of its free web development tool. The new version now comes with deeper Windows Azure integration and support for GitHub. WebMatrix users can now sign in through Windows Azure and create up to 10 sites for free. The capability means users can manage their sites locally or in Windows Azure. In WebMatrix 3, developers can do remote editing of their sites. It has a new visual site gallery that allows the user to open existing sites on their ...

A lot of people don't carry cameras anymore, now that they have smartphones. But that means that you could miss opportunities to capture great moments, especially when you're missing out on the great optical zoom available on some more expensive or specialized dedicated camera devices. That's what Snapzoom hopes to fix with its binocular mount for smartphone cameras, and the best part is that it's completely universal, meaning it fits a wide variety of both phones and binoculars.

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice for day two is ShipHawk, a Santa Barbara-based shipping startup that launched this week at the conference. ShipHawk, co-founded by Jeremy Bodenhamer and Aaron Freeman, is a fully-featured online shipping platform that takes care of everything from providing shipping estimates to handling package pickup, delivery, packing, insurance and more for both residential and commercial addresses.

Square's point-of-sale technology and iPad-powered register, Square Register is getting a big update today targeted at better serving restaurants. New features in the release include custom order modifiers and customizable kitchen tickets that allow restaurants to make taking orders and serving food more efficient.

Considering the gold rush around peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin, it's not surprising that one of the hackers at the Disrupt NY hackathon created an application around the currency. Pay With Bits was to be a Square for Bitcoin. The startup essentially allows Bitcoins to be transfered between parties via their mobile phones.

Netflix’s “House of Cards” took center stage at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, with an official spoof about the back room jockeying over seat assignments at the coveted press dinner. The clip even gave a big nod to BuzzFeed’s alternative BBQ held during the actual dinner. Despite their admirable popularity, BuzzFeed is not a member of the White House Correspondents Association and didn’t get a table. “A colonoscopy would be cooler than that dinner,” BuzzFeed Editor in Chief, Be...

The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon has been underway for a few hours now and we’re already seeing a bunch of cool projects. Team Geem is building what it calls a “Pandora for Exercise.” The service, which will hopefully be ready in time to be demoed tomorrow, will create exercise programs that are tailored for the individual user. The usual exercise DVDs, Geem believes, are just too boring and repetitive, so a web-based exercise service that’s fully customized can help break through that routine. ...

Sites like Kickstarter have been used to crowdfund a wide range of projects, but I don't think they've ever done what Synergist is attempting today — they've never crowdfunded themselves. The site was founded by 17-year-old Jared Kleinert, who described Synergist as a mix of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for social enterprises (i.e., organizations that aim to do good, rather than make money, but apply commercial strategies to achieve those aims). The funding mechanism is pretty similar to Ki...

You're familiar with the scenario of not being able to keeping up with some of your best contacts because there are probably now plenty of them? Small businesses have that same problem, and they aren't about to employ heavy lifting CRM to solve that simple problem. Contactually, which has previously raised money form Point Nine Capital, Boston Seed and 500 Startups, is going to try to address this with a major new iteration of the platform it launched in 2011.

Back in 2010, Google launched Instant Preview to provide users with a quick way to get a graphic preview of a webpage before you click on the actual link. Now, as first spotted by Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog, it looks like Google is thinking about removing this feature and replacing it with a new drop-down menu. Update: a Google spokesperson just responded to our inquiry: ”We’re constantly making changes to the layout and features of the search results page.” The wording ...